03/11/2026
Obituary for Virginia Stuart -
Durham, NH -- Virginia Stuart—beloved teacher, award-winning magazine writer, practiced meditator, baker of perfectly toasted almonds, fan of interspecies friendships and all things French—died on February 21st from carcinoid cancer at Maine Medical Center in Portland, ME, with her loving husband at her side. Her family and friends miss her dearly.
Born on New Year’s Eve in 1953, Ginny lived in Littleton, MA, until she was seven years old, when she was dismayed to learn that route 495 would be built through her family’s dairy farm. Her parents and their five daughters resettled in Stratham, NH, on land that would become Stuart Farm. Ginny quickly grew to love the fields and forests of her new home, which abutted the Squamscott River. A passionate animal lover from the beginning, she enjoyed milking cows and feeding calves at a young age and declared that she wanted to be an animal psychologist when she grew up. Through 4-H, she showed Guernsey cattle, Suffolk sheep, and her Irish setter, Sean.
Ginny graduated from the University of New Hampshire in 1975 with a degree in botany and plant science, but after working as a traveling plant saleswoman and then a greenhouse employee in Seattle, she decided to follow her fascination with the written word instead and earned her master’s in creative writing at UNH. After graduation, she became a full-time writing lecturer and discovered her love for teaching. With professor Donald Graves, she co-authored Write from the Start, a guide for parents looking to help their children tap into the joy of writing.
At a UNH event, Ginny met the man who would become the love of her life, John Hill, and the two got to know each other while working for Trillium Press in New York City. John was impressed not only with Ginny’s sharp mind and linguistic knowledge, but also with her mastery of ragtime music. An accomplished jazz pianist, Ginny adored Scott Joplin and even wrote a jazz piece of her own, Golden Swan Rag. John and Ginny married on Stuart Farm, and seven years later (after making an extensive pros and cons list, according to family legend), the couple had their first daughter, Lindsay. The second, Eliza, arrived several years after, and the family moved to a cozy cape house in Durham, which they painted an elegant shade of maroon, Ginny’s favorite color.
With her gift for evocative storytelling, Ginny had a rich career in communications, writing for Yankee Magazine, New Hampshire Profiles, and eventually UNH’s alumni magazine, where she held the position of associate writer and editor for more than a decade. Often following her curiosity about animals, she crafted many feature stories that won medals from the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE), including stories celebrating a quirky spider expert (“Spider Man”), the s*x lives of lobsters (“Crustaceans with Attitude”), and the wonders of New England’s iconic ungulates (“The Not-So-Elusive Maine Moose”). In her later years at UNH, she took over the alumni office Facebook account, where she impersonated the university’s 205-year-old founder, Benjamin Thompson. The account’s number of followers jumped from 500 to 1500 in a single month.
The spritely attitude Ginny brought to her writing projects also suffused the rest of her life, where she often “elbow danced” to music her daughters played in the car (hands firmly on the wheel for safety) and once whipped out an “extendo-fork” at Christmas dinner, stealing a morsel from her sister’s plate across the table. Ever intrigued by new animal possibilities, Ginny dreamed of getting pygmy goats or potbellied pigs to keep the family cats company, and after meeting an especially personable pug named Luigi on neighborhood walks, she joined her daughters in lobbying their dad for a pug, singing three-part harmonies extolling the virtues of the dogs. Their efforts eventually bore fruit in beloved pugs Ulla and, later, Willow.
Ginny was delighted when her two daughters joined a local theater company, Oyster River Players. She volunteered as the company’s publicist for 15 years, bringing her extensive communications experience and ties to local newspapers to the role. Her calm, approachable demeanor allowed her to quickly gain the trust of the young thespians she interviewed. But her playful side also showed that she was one of them at heart when she shared the stage with them in the company’s production of “Fiddler on the Roof” and brought down the house in the character of Grandma Tzeitel, singing with a piercingly high voice while sitting on top of a disguised fellow parent’s shoulders. Ginny also sang with more dulcet tones as a member of Voices from the Heart, a chorus made up of 200 women. In 2007, she traveled with the group to Croatia and Slovenia, where she sang with local choirs and helped raise $73,000 to clear minefields in Perusic.
In 2015, Ginny began a new career as a teacher of English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) at Manchester Community College and later Dover Adult Learning Center, where she had been volunteering for several years. To better understand what her students were going through in learning a language that wasn’t their native tongue, she returned to her childhood pursuit of French. Despite being told by some acquaintances that it was “too late” for her to re-learn the language, she excelled, chatting regularly with two native French speakers by video call and joining a local French group, which brightened the more difficult days after her cancer diagnosis. Her last overseas trip was to Paris, where she relished conversing in French with cab drivers and visiting the hip restaurant Mokonuts, home of the famous cranberry and chocolate-chip rye cookies that had captivated her several years before.
When she wasn’t working, Ginny could often be found meditating or communing with the natural world. She loved walking on local trails with friends and family, identifying birds with her Merlin app, and excitedly sharing new plant and creature sightings. Drawing on her background in botany, she taught her daughters to identify many types of trees—and to detest many an invasive plant. A self-described “bleeding-heart environmentalist,” Ginny joined her neighbors in urging the Nature Conservancy to purchase nearby land that was at risk of being turned into a golf course in the 1990s.
Throughout her life, Ginny was constantly finding ways to help people: generating housing ideas for friends, researching medical conditions or providers for family, helping her ESOL students apply for jobs or citizenship, and offering emotional support to members of her two cancer support groups. She also loved having four sisters, cultivating close relationships with each and often serving as the glue that brought them all together. Her sisters benefited both from her wise counsel and her sense of fun.
An endlessly curious person, Ginny was motivated by a desire to connect with all kinds of people and learn their stories. From her daughters’ friends to her ESOL students, she touched the lives of everyone who knew her with her authentic interest in who they were. In her final days, she got to know every nurse who attended her in the hospital—even those she described as “tough nuts to crack”—noting that their tattoos were often a good conversation starter.
With consummate research skills sparked by her innate curiosity and honed through her journalistic experience, Ginny learned everything she could about her cancer and often jokingly referred to herself as “a professional patient.” She worked hard to blend a deeper understanding of the reality of her illness with a genuinely positive outlook that focused on living her life as fully and happily as she could.
Ginny is survived by her husband, John Hill; daughters Lindsay Hill and Eliza Hill and their respective partners, Justin Quam and Aidan Down; dog Willow; four sisters and their husbands: Lorraine and John Merrill, Anne Stuart and Paul Santos, Carolyn Stuart, and Laura Stuart; three sisters- and brothers-in-law: Katie Wentworth, Chris Hill, and Hope Firestone; nine nieces and nephews and their partners: Nathan and Judy Merrill, Justin and Leah Merrill, Emily and Chloe Holmes, Christopher and Kirsten Holmes, Claire Holmes and Mike Breen, Dante Santos and Bennett Ellis, Hillary Wentworth and Paul Foster, Nickerson Hill, and Adrian Hill; six grand nieces and nephews: Hannah Dye, Sammy Merrill, Catherine Merrill, Anastacia Niemi, Winn Foster, and Penny Holmes; and a wide circle of friends. Ginny was predeceased by her father, James Stuart, and mother, Lorraine Stuart.
In lieu of flowers, the family welcomes donations to Dover Adult Learning Center ( www.doveradultlearning.org ), Southeast Land Trust of New Hampshire ( www.seltnh.org ), and the Neuroendocrine Tumor Research Foundation ( https://netrf.org/get-involved/give-now )
A memorial service will be held in the coming months. Date and time will be listed on this site.
